I don’t think it’s a good practice to craft public policy around rare isolated tragedies. Whether it would have stopped Sandy Hook or not is not really relevant to whether it’s a good idea to add mental health records to NICS database. It either is or isn’t, and that didn’t change before or after Sandy Hook.
Why would they seek out psychiatric treatment if doing so would mean a permanent revocation of their right to own a gun?
If alcoholics automatically had their driver’s licenses permanently revoked, I suspect we’d see a sharp falloff in the number of people voluntarily going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
But it doesn’t, as I detailed above. Seeking treatment is not disqualifying.
Right, and those disincentives to treatment have existed for years too. I personally have avoided psychiatric treatment for that very reason, so I know from experience. I know other people who have done the same. It’s a real issue currently, and one we don’t need to make worse.
What do you think causes that stigma against mental health treatment? I could care less what Mr. Brown down the block thinks about me, especially since he’ll never know if I seek out treatment or not. But if the US government thinks I’m unfit to exercise my basic constitutional rights, that’s real stigma and a real disincentive.
If a psychiatrist certifies that I’m so unstable as to be dangerous to myself and others, and recommends that I not be allowed to buy, carry or touch a firearm, you’re okay with those restrictions being temporary? Has anyone ever been refused a firearm due to a background check and later had those restrictions lifted? Because I’ve never heard of it.
On preview Bone’s cite says that according to the BATF, “…whether a person has been adjudicated a mental defective or committed to a mental institution, the firearms disability is permanent.”
Right now that’s true. But some of the discussion in this thread has been about whether the current standard is adequate, or whether it should be broadened in various ways (since right now flagrantly crazy people are still managing to get their hands on weapons because they’ve managed to avoid involuntary commitment). It’s only fair to mention that broadening the current standard so it would catch people like the Virginia Tech and Aurora Colorado shooters might have an unanticipated downside.
Tell that to the next depressed teenager you see. Telling people “Certain mental health issues could disqualify you from exercising your basic constitutional rights, and prevent you from engaging in lots of professions and plenty of hobbies” is a great way to ensure they will avoid seeking a diagnosis, which will make any sort of treatment impossible. And we wonder where the stigma comes from?
Then I turn the question around, are you okay with people who are deemed a danger to themselves and others, or those who are unfit to manage their own affairs, to purchase and possess firearms?
I don’t want to speak for DrCube, but I’m not. How does making it more likely that they will avoid seeking treatment help the situation?
Regards,
Shodan
The existence of the study of mental health. We already make determinations about people who are a danger to themselves or others. That’s not a new concept. I don’t know if there are studies about the accuracy of those diagnoses and if it’s even possible to back and evaluate from a distance whether someone was a danger to himself at a particular point. Our ability to evaluate each other isn’t perfect, but it’s also the only tool we have. Meanwhile, nobody is proposing “government doctors,” “screening the general public,” banning everyone with mental health problems from owning a gun, or banning everyone with a diagnosed mental health problem from gun ownership for life.
Ah. If you had made it clear earlier that you were generalizing from experience, I would have understood what you were actually saying. I thought you were saying you could argue this is a major problem.
Ignorance. The perception that people with mental illnesses are raving maniacs, that kind of thing.
They already are temporary, or at least they are in many states. And yes, I’m OK with that if they’ve improved with treatment and enough time has passed.
Yes. Did you look first?
That would appear to no longer be the case, then.
Nobody has proposed that seeking treatment would be enough to disqualify anyone.
We’re not talking about depression. If you’re depressed and you’re refusing to get help because you think a court will decide you’re mentally defective or a danger to yourself or others, that’s wrongheaded and really unfortunate.
Not really. But as I said before, I don’t trust the psychiatric profession (and the associated “court, board, commission, or other lawful authority”) to accurately or precisely make that determination. Plenty of “batshit crazy” people are perfectly safe. And there are plenty of cold, calculating, outwardly functional psychopaths.
Here’s my position: Dangerous and cruel psychopaths should not be allowed to own, carry or use guns. For that matter, neither should ordinary, non-insane murderers, rapists and armed robbers. But since we haven’t invented functional crystal balls yet, we don’t really have the ability to distinguish between potential murderers and peace loving, law abiding, harmless citizens.
Any method we use to make that determination will be (and is) plagued with false positives and false negatives, to the point where the costs far outweigh the benefits. The costs in this case include, but are not limited to, discouraging mental health treatment and stigmatizing mental illness in the general population, which makes this a particularly dangerous method of gun control.
That’s in addition to the fact that any determined killer, upon learning that his mental health diagnosis prohibits him from buying firearms, will just get his uninstitutionalized friend to buy one for him. Or steal it from his parents, or the guy down the block, or buy it on the black market, or whatever.
And “making it harder” isn’t an accurate description. A speed bump doesn’t make it any harder for me to get where I’m going. It may discourage particularly lazy or undetermined drivers though, so there’s that.
This kind of “if we can’t do it perfectly, we shouldn’t try” reasoning plagues gun control debates- and very few other legal debates.
But it happens all the time. When the government says “People deemed mentally ill will be prohibited from exercising their constitutional rights”, lots of people will refuse to take that chance of being labeled mentally ill. Even if there is a huge difference between “mental illnesses in general” and “mental illness that will get your rights taken away”.
Basically, the focus on mental illness at all is the problem. What we should be focusing on is “murderous psychopaths”, but instead we’ve placed our focus on the superset of “mentally ill”. Which is understandable because there is no way to tease out the murderers from the rest. But it sure casts a shadow on mental illness.
Here’s the Venn diagram in my mind. There’s the big circle for the “mentally ill”. Inside that is a much smaller circle “illnesses which will cause your rights to be taken away”. Microscopically smaller than that is the set of people who are actually murderers, either now or in the future. And that circle straddles the “restricted rights” circle because some of them will be missed by the courts.
My argument is that making the “restricted rights” circle larger will not reliably catch more of the “actual murderers” circle, but it will catch a lot more of the “mentally ill who aren’t murders” circle. And the existence of the “restricted rights” circle, as it is or potentially even larger, keeps a lot of people as far away from the “diagnosed as mentally ill” circle as they can get, even to their own detriment.
Not my argument. My argument is “if it doesn’t work we shouldn’t do it”.
For example, wearing seat belts works in that lives will be saved by them, even if some lives won’t be saved, and some seat belts will fail, or whatever.
On the other hand telling people “you can’t legally buy this gun” will not keep guns out of the hands of murderers. At all.
But I think that’s a different debate and I’m sorry I brought it up.
Then maybe they shouldn’t own a gun. You seem to be especially concerned that these people, who would fail the mental stability test, are denied some right they should RIGHTLY be denied in the first place. Are you especially concerned that some ex-cons can’t vote or own weapons? That sex offenders can’t live near schools?
Permanent revocation of their government-given right is a FEATURE of this law, not an unintended consequence. And if they refuse to get diagnosed? Well, then they can’t get a gun. No one should be able to get a gun without some kind of stamp of sanity, so either way they are shit out of luck, for good reason.
As for the AA analogy, that would fit if we are all required to pass AA before getting a license. I wouldn’t be too upset if the very low threshold of being able to own a driver’s license is that you’re not a raging alcoholic who can’t control himself. That is a feature, not an unintended consequence
Where is AHunter3? I’m surprised he’s not here with righteous indignation and a bunch of cites.
I say, by all means, let’s stigmatize the mentally ill and take away the rights of many just to make sure we get that vanishingly small percent who are actually dangerous.
That’s silly. All murderer use guns? All murderers will, without fail, resort to stealing a gun if they cannot legally buy one? This kind of casual assumption on the part of gun advocates to the mindset of criminals is oddly telling, but ultimately irrational. There will be a non-zero number of people who want to kill who will not because they can’t get a gun. Just as I can say there are a non-zero number of people who would likely be criminals if not for the deterrence of jail, societal shame, and simply because its too much trouble.
Telling someone you can’t legally buy a gun DOES keep guns out of some people, and it reduces the violence of people who have guns but snap and use a convenient tool to exercise their wrath.
So now all gun buyers must undergo a battery of long testing before getting a gun? Who pays for that?
The only place I’ve encountered a “stamp of sanity” is on the Simpsons. No such thing exists.
Who said anything about a battery of long testing? Anyway, I’ll tell you who doesn’t pay for it: A possible victim saved because a nut didn’t get a gun. 
You know another way to be sure that somebody can receive a “stamp of sanity”?
Nice soundbite that does nothing to answer my question.
First off, I’ve found this type of topic interesting for a while, especially since it seems that the gun control debate in my country never seems to frame it correctly around this issue.
A member of my family works in psychiatric healthcare, and I’ve heard a lot of interesting stories about the types of people who wind up locked away from society due to extreme disorders. I’ve also heard about the treatment being short-term, reparative. The point of bringing this up is, it is an important distinction if we are going to seriously discuss mental health and gun use in our country. Specifically, if a mentally ill person can improve, or use a treatment routine that allows them to function in society - should they be allowed to own guns still?
Here is where it gets a bit muddy in my mind:
If there was a national roster of mentally ill people used to prevent gun ownership, we need to acknowledge that mental health and unhealth are transitory states. So bearing this in mind, that would seem to indicate not only a need for the roster - but also an effective way to clear the roster of people who are now functioning well.
But from what I have heard anecdotally, mental healthcare in the US, at least in state hospitals, is not very good. Treatments are moved around a lot, patients learn to manipulate the system. How reliable would it be to trust that cleared patients still have their faculties given this imperfect system?
Would it be better to simply treat gun ownership like a diver’s license, in that your license “marks” certain defects (such as bad eyesight, but in this case mental illness) and so these defects necessarily impose certain restrictions on what kinds of guns, if any, you can own?
Then again, maybe the roster idea is simply in the wrong direction. Maybe if we simply invest in and develop better-funded mental health clinics and protocols for treating patients, along with identifying signs early on in schools, we wouldn’t need to impose a roster or such stringent gun laws because the number of crazy people walking the streets would be severely reduced and so the accidents and tragedies few and far between.